Why does a face always look beautiful with tears?
It could be a fat face, an ugly face, a pretty face, a young face,
An old face, a haggard face or a worried face.
The face always looks beautiful with tears.
It could be a man's face, a woman's face or a genderless face
A Chinese, a caucasian, an Indian or a nationless face
It could be a black, a white, brown, yellow or a colorless face
It could be a pimpled, an acned or a faultless face
The face always looks beautiful with tears..
Reading, writing, reflecting. Trying to take an honest look at myself as much as I can. And that's not easy.
I've realised that it take years to build yourself a safe, comfortable, unchallenging, mindlessly busy life. You may spend most of this life cribbing and complaining about all the insignificant hindrances around you. Your job -- which is probably one of the most exciting jobs the city has to offer (how many of us gets to scan a city’s flora and fauna for a living) -- begins to seem like drudgery. Everything becomes a routine.
Over the past months, events -- uncalled for accidents -- have made me take a fresh look at myself. This probably takes greater courage than losing a dear one, because here you are on your own. Stripped of your ego, your pride, your status, your friendships – its your own individual world. The world closest to your soul. The world where every one of us stands alone.
Am dwelling on taking on an experiment to explore this inner world. Put away all that I have done, all that I have been and all that I stood for – and start from scratch. I’m afraid what the experiment would reveal. What would I lose and how would I come out? Would there be anything of me left at all? Several questions in my mind. But there's one excitement -- the hope that finally, finally, I may befriend my soul. The hope that I would soon know who I am -- not good, not bad, not kind, not mean... just that one existantial question. Who am I.
Uninvited she arrives,
Dressed daintily
Like a dark princess.
Demands the mind
The heart, soul
Life itself.
She wants to stay.
Take her in,
Hold her.
Like you, she's lonely.
Last night a tiny moth flew by and settled on my laptop. He spent all nigth on and around my laptop. This morning I found him dead on the floor nearby.
To me, it seems like this moth was telling something. That he had approved my ode. In a stupid way, I feel honoured. Like instant appreciation from the subject of my work. I picked up his body and laid it to rest in a plant vase in my balcony. May he rest in peace. Amen!
(September 23, 2010. 11 am)
Ode to the moth
Whirling dervishes
Dance dizzily around the light bulb
Rapt in reverie
Oblivious to night perils
Daring to die. Or seeking death?
A dash of dull grey
Paled in comparison
To the brilliance of the black night
Elusive, characterless
Rushing feverishly towards definite death
You make me see
The beauty of the unremarkable
Hi all,
Clearly I am getting nostalgic in my last few days at Indian Express, a national daily where I worked for the past 3 years. I wonder if these are my last few days as a journalist as well. But then again, I think the journalist in me will never die. Like they say, you can take a journalist out of a field but you can't take the field out of the journalist.
As of now, being true to my nostalgia - and a bit narcissist, maybe - I am only putting up some of my favourite stories. These may not necessarily be the best reportage on the field but they sure are the stories I had most fun doing.
Soon I plan to write a lot more. And a lot more impromptu stuff. Hoping for some poetry, some good pieces on issues I care about, maybe some short story.. Dunno what my Muse would throw up.
A bit nervous.. am really writing after so long.. Hope its good work.. (if theres one thing I'd hate for the world to see and say 'its a piece of shit', its my writing! But then, I certainly have the courage to take it if its the turth. So please leave your honest comments behind.. )
pic courtesy: http://oceans.taraexpeditions.org
Marine ecosystems are the most complex and least well-known to man despite being significant indicators of global health. It is known that the waters, which cover two-thirds of our planet, are home to several ‘oxygen factories’ like the phytoplankton. However, the world of oceanic microbes remains largely unexplored. In a bid to create a database of these remarkably complex organisms, nearly 100 oceanographers, biologists, geneticists and physicists from some of the world’s best laboratories have set out on an incredible expedition across international boundaries, aboard the sailboat Tara Oceans, to study them.
Tara Oceans, sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme and French fashion designer Agnes B, set sail from Lorient, Brittany, on September 5, and was in Mumbai for a brief stopover from Thursday to Saturday, before moving on to Goa and then to Male, Maldives. Chris Bowler, a scientist from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who is heading the expedition, said: “Our effort is to provide snapshots of how the ocean looks in the 21st century so that 100 years from now, there’s a record, which can form a basis for further research. Today, we know that the seas are acidifying and scientists often speculate how the condition would affect the food chain.”
Three years on the high seas
For the next three years, Tara Oceans will sail around the world collecting samples of deep water ecosystems, documenting sea temperatures, salinity, acidity and pollution and understanding marine life adaptation to environmental stress. “We plan to sail 80,000 nautical miles covering the Indian Ocean this year, the South Atlantic and the South Pacific the next, and across the northern seas in 2012 before returning to Lorient,” said Romain Troublé, operational manager for Tara Oceans. At any given time, the boat will lodge six scientists, six sailors and two international journalists.
A thousand litres of sample waters from different depths will be collected every two days. Plankton and other organisms collected will be preserved. Every three weeks, 300 kg of the samples will be couriered from the sailboat to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, and from there to labs in France, Spain, Arizona, etc., Troublé explained. Having travelled 15,000 nautical miles so far, the team is set to see the outcome of their first leg of research in the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.
Not smooth sailing in India
THE team, however, is facing a hitch in Indian waters. “It’s a pity that we are unable to conduct research in 200 nautical miles of Indian waters because we couldn’t get the necessary permissions from authorities. However, we are now trying to get help from the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa,” Troublé said. “We are considering including a few NIO scientists in our expedition, but they will join us later, in the South Atlantic Ocean.” The only other country where the crew couldn’t get permission was Oman.
State-of-the-art system
Marc Picheral, an oceanographic engineer from France who has developed the scientific systems in the sailboat, said, “Our advanced equipments include a three-dimensional microscope called Spim which gives a complete view of organisms, flow cams and special microscopes that remain stable in a moving boat.” However, the star tool of the expedition is the Conductivity Temperature Depth (CTD) profiler, an all-in-one instrument which combines a high-resolution camera with a host of sensors to measure salinity, temperature, pressure, turbidity and depth and a system of bottles to collect water samples automatically. The CTD can be lowered to depths of up to 2,000 metres.
According to Jennifer Gillette, a cell biologist from the National Institute of Health, Maryland, USA, who has been onboard as an optical engineer for a month, “In the past month, I have documented images of thousands of phytoplankton and zooplankton, many of which have almost no reference in the existing literature. We are now studying their taxonomy.” The first large scale study will include DNA and genetic make-up, physical and chemical analysis.
Marvels of the sea
“We can’t wait to reach the southern bend of the Indian Ocean, where a unique cycle occurs. Here, gyres, or rings formed in the water, push a layer of water around Africa’s Cape Town all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to South America in a process called ‘seeding’. We are observing these waters through satellite—they are rich in planktons peculiar to the Indian Ocean, which are taken into the Atlantic to form an interesting colony. We also plan to study the water in regions with concentration of plastic waste, high pH levels, and coral reefs,” Bowler said. The route of Tara Oceans was put together according to three factors: the areas for research chosen by the scientists, the progress of the seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres and the direction of the prevailing wind, since winds are a determining factor for the voyage of a sailing ship.
